MATOSINHOS LIVING LAB AIMS AT CREATING SMART, ZERO-CARBON EMISSIONS, RESILIENT, ACCESSIBLE, PARTICIPATORY AND CONNECTED NEIGHBOURHOOD
Matosinhos is a coastal city in the district of Porto. The living lab is located in a central area of the city surrounding the City Hall, where the main public services are centred, composed by several points with distinct physical, economic and social characteristics. It is an initiative of Municipality of Matosinhos, CEiiA (Centre of Engineering and Product Development), Porto Polytechnic, Metro do Porto, Efacec, among others. The overall objective of is to create a smart neighbourhood, as a low carbon space, resilient, accessible, participated and connected. It aims at testing technological solutions for low-carbon, energy efficient and reducing pollutant emissions. It acts in areas such as mobility and transport, buildings, environmental innovation and the promotion of circular economy, to decarbonize the city.
It is a project of co-creation and open innovation of products, services, software, hardware and low-carbon urban interventions, where municipalities, knowledge centres, companies, entrepreneurs and citizens interact.
Real context tests are performed for challenges like parking management, bike sharing, electrification of the fleet, traffic monitoring.
A CITIZEN-ENGAGEMENT EXPERIENCE
Matosinhos is preparing to become a living experience of what may be the cities of the future regarding the carbon intensity of daily activities. The citizens will be engaged in the creation and experimentation of cleaner and more intelligent technologies. The project also aims to promote entrepreneurship and the development of low-carbon business solutions.
In this sense, the role of the University was to develop a methodology to assess the impacts on the citizens. Indeed, the Polytechnics of Porto has created a technological tool to monitor social impact on two levels: customer perception of the use of the technologies offered by the living lab and the appropriation of the concept of “citizen centre” by them. This tool will be based on the use of the OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) cube, analysing the 3 perspectives presented of the BSC (Balanced SoreCard): customers’ perspective, learning perspective and economic-financial perspective.
MATOSINHOS LIVING LAB GOES BEYOND THE DECARBONIZATION OF THE CITY
Besides decarbonizing the city, the project’s goals include decreasing energy consumption, providing a test-bed for solutions that can be scaled to the whole city, to other cities and eventually to other countries, having a more comfortable and sustainable mobility, and promoting the use of renewable energies.
Several activities are being performed in order to achieve those goals, namely:
- Development, testing and experimentation of innovative and integrated technological solutions, in real context, intersecting mobility, energy, buildings and connectivity
- Promotion of strong user involvement, with the co-creation of solution
- Evaluation of social adoption of these solutions
- Measurement and evaluation of carbon emissions in real time powered by mobi.me (CEiiA’s mobility management platform)
- Intelligent traffic monitoring in Matosinhos using radars and sensors
- Placement in buses stops of real-time information monitors, managed by mobi.me, displaying the time, the atmospheric temperature and the waiting time for the incoming buses
Therefore, the project, apart from reducing the carbon emissions, intends to provide more quality in public spaces, more energetic efficiency, better life quality inside public building, improvement of road safety, increasing connectivity between citizen and all agents, and promotion entrepreneurship and new businesses creation related to low carbon solutions (development of new products and services). How? With auto sustainable lamps that measure carbon emissions, with pavement that reduces vehicle speed without drivers’ intervention, with a bike sharing system connected to the public transport system with a real time measurement of CO2 emissions spared, with an autonomous robot to support urban cleaning, among other activities and tools.
This blog article is written with reference to a good practice case study report prepared as part of the Erasmus+ University City Action Lab (UCITYLAB) Project.
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Featured picture retrieved from https://www.cm-matosinhos.pt/